Isa Genzken: Fuck the Bauhaus

Fuck the Bauhaus, a series of audacious architectural models for future high-rise buildings in Manhattan, marks a poetic and provocative shift in Isa Genzken’s artistic oeuvre. Made in the year 2000, out of quotidian objects and cheap materials foraged in the streets and stores of New York, these sculptural assemblages depart from the German artist’s ‘post-Minimalist’ works begun in the 1970s. The earlier works conjured the haunting spectres of catastrophe, destruction and failed utopia, as well as the potential for freedom amidst the ruins of post-War reconstruction culture.

Analysing Genzken’s post-2000 penchant for appropriation, collage and montage, André Rottmann offers a strikingly original reading of Genzken’s move towards merging sculptural and architectural morphologies into a trailblazing practice of contemporary assemblage. Drawing on the writings of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Bruno Latour and other theorists of assemblage, Rottmann shows how the artist’s ‘late style’ is not a return to (neo-)avant-garde traditions but a powerful reimagining of them for the contemporary moment.

Paperback 6 x 8 1/2 inches, 104 pp., 33 colour illus., 2024 – £15.99
e-book 104 pp., 33 colour illus., 2024

Probing a transitional moment in the career of one of the most important sculptors of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Rottmann carefully assesses and helpfully reframes how we are to understand assemblage as an aesthetic procedure. In his telling Genzken explodes sculpture only to offer new principles of modelling adequate to our commodity-choked world. 

– David Joselit, Arthur Kingsley Porter Professor of Art, Film, and Visual Studies, Harvard University

Rottmann’s fascinating reading of Isa Genzken’s Fuck the Bauhaus takes us on a beautifully crafted critical journey: from her ‘architecturally-minded’ sculptures to the ‘uncharted territory’ strategically opened up by the artist’s late works as they dismantle or derail a lingering modern telos. Tracing Genzken’s defiant gestures of departure from sculptural conventions – functioning simultaneously as means of disidentification with art criticism conditioning those norms – the book offers an invaluable portrait of an artist vanquishing formal limits and confounding critics. In Rottmann’s analysis, Genzken emerges not only as a brilliant and often hilarious interlocutor with modern architecture and its failed promise, but as marking out a consequential contemporary aesthetic methodology, one able to navigate heterogenous modes of association, alliance and assemblage – or agencement – in its wake. 

– Felicity Scott, Professor of Architecture, Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, Columbia University